When Marvel filmed Avengers: Infinity War, they had no way of knowing how successful Black Panther would be. They probably guessed it would be successful enough. Because all of the Marvel movies have been. But 3rd highest domestic gross and and 5th biggest opening weekend. Beyond the money, it was a cultural phenomena that made so many different people feel their voice heard in new and undeniable ways. It also inspired Disney to share a little bit of the wealth to support youth STEM programs. Which means they will unequivocally make a sequel.

They did know, when filming Infinity War, that Sony owns Spider-man. It’s one of their biggest franchises (though rumor has it if Sony Pictures is sold to another studio the rights to Spider-man revert to Marvel). Spider-man 2 is already slated to open July, 2019.

Which means

stirring up some spoiler dust »

there is no way Marvel can actually kill of either Black Panther or Spider-man. It’s not even a question. And if they come back from ash, everyone who turned to ash will be back.

This, in some ways, diminishes the impact of the final moments of Infinity War. If they had picked different characters. If they had known how successful Black Panther would be and so made different choices. If Tom Holland wasn’t so delightfully adorable and one of the most lovable of the Avengers. I don’t think Marvel was trying to convince us the end is actually the end. But what good is an end you know is going to be undone?

Other than that, the writing is pretty spectacular. It balances a trove of characters fluidly, drawing them into each others stories and allowing each to matter to the story in unique ways. That really is the strength of the film – all these characters, the way they work together, the way the show up. And that they each have an emotional connection to the fight in this film.

Strangely, it doesn’t make it was powerful as one might think. I cried three times at The Avengers. Not just the first time I saw it but time and again because something in the story and the characters moved me to irresistible tears. I didn’t cry once in Infinity War. Even though there were several places I might have. But no matter how dramatic the moment, it didn’t reach deep within me and evoke the same sort of emotion as that first Avengers.

And I haven’t pinpointed what it’s lacking because on the surface, it’s got great characters and dramatic moments and a really solid script. It intertwines all these different character threads seamlessly. But… I don’t feel it. I laugh. Because a lot of it is funny. Maybe it’s that the film spends so much time with the villain, what he’s doing and a lot of time with why. It’s an important part of the narrative. But it means mostly the characters I know and love don’t have anything else to do but fight. It also doesn’t help that Thanos is so powerful that the only thing the Avengers can do is fight and either die or hope Thanos walks away.

I guess Avengers: Infinity War is a film with so many great elements and so many great characters. That at least the first time around didn’t have enough heart.

Writing:

★★★¾☆

Characters:

★★★★☆

Performances:

★★★★☆

Directing:

★★★¾☆

Production:

★★★★¼

Overall:

★★★★☆

If my scoring system allowed it I’d score it like 3.9 or 3.95. Not quite a full 4 stars, but slightly better than the average high 3 rating.

]]>http://girlsspeakgeek.com/avengers-infinity-war/feed/0best tv of 2017http://girlsspeakgeek.com/best-tv-of-2017/
Mon, 16 Apr 2018 00:19:07 +0000http://girlsspeakgeek.com/?p=132682017 was all about Netflix and on demand. Binge watching series I started live to see how they ended up. Catching new shows for something fresh and dynamic. I have to say, though, the binge watches far outweigh anything new. Because there aren’t that many shows on now that I really love. And because something that is a bit of a hybrid – familiar but also new and different – will probably always be my favorite.

I just can’t put Once Upon a Time on the list. I will give them credit for an incredibly innovative reboot. But the new cast really isn’t dynamic enough and a lot of the problems with the series carried through and it’s just not that good.

I know I should say Stranger Things and while it’s really well done, it’s not the sort of thing I want to sit around and rewatch.

And rewatching is the theme of the year. If a show is good enough to watch two, three times then it deserves to be on the list.

Chicago PD
A late list means a late edition. I didn’t start watching Chicago PD until April of 2018 (it’s totally going on the 2018 list also!) and it would be higher on this list if I wasn’t sort of cheating by adding it. But it’s amazing. Yes, it’s a cop drama. But also, it’s got heart and emotion and it’s serialized – but just enough to keep you watching each episode, not so much that you feel lost. Patrick Flueger (who you’ll remember from The 4400) and Jesse Lee Soffer are both kind of great in their own ways. And, I mean, it’s a double latch show! With Sophia Bush, who I thought I despised from the early seasons of One Tree Hill, but who I actually really like a lot.

So, yeah, it’s so good it’s worth cheating on my own list!

8. No Tomorrow
When I was watching No Tomorrow, when it was live, I really loved it. It was fun and silly but with heart. As it progressed, though, as it took itself too seriously everything kind of fell apart. Xavier and Evie were the best part of the show (and Joshua Saasse!). All the other things were noise and that noise became annoying more than fun. But Xavier and Evie – their antics, sorting out their relationship, pushing each other to grow in different ways – it was a lot of fun.

7. Shooter
ok, Shooter only half counts. I watched season one twice, and the movie for the first time. Not in that order (movie first, which made me curious about the show). The show is definitely better than the movie. Because there’s time for more depth and for the story to play out more fully. Tom Sizemore is super icky so ugh. He nearly ruined the show but once I’d been through it once I could fast forward through all his scenes. Ryan Phillipe on the other hand is pretty fantastic and (sorry) better than Mark Wahlberg. Probably because he has more time with a tv series instead of a film but he totally sells the whole Bob Lee Swagger bit. Shantel VanSanten is also really good as his wife, Julie. The two of them make the show watchable.

6. iZombie
I was really skeptical about iZombie at first. But then I watched the first episode and rolled right into the second, and third and watched like a season and a half in a weekend. Rose McIver plays the different versions of Olivia quite amusingly and the arcs twist on each other enough to keep it interesting. It is hilarious with all the word play, so clever and cheesy and amusing all at once (I’d say Ravi has all the best lines but really each character has at least one or two really good ones). It’s nice to see David Anders on a show again where he gets to play around with different shades of this character. And Robert Buckley as Major Lilywhite keeps things interesting (don’t I say that every show needs a good latch?!).

5. Haven
I watch the first few seasons of Haven live then lost track of it (mostly because Syfy was stingy with how you could stream things and then I wasn’t in the mood). But once I got back into it, seasons 4 and 5 kept things interesting. Some parts of it that I loved when it was live (like Nathan and Audrey) I didn’t love as much when rewatching. They’re good and all but the second time around I gained a new appreciation for Duke (who I wasn’t too fond of that first time). His character is soooo compelling. Gets put in the most interesting dilemmas and is so different than a lot of what we see on tv and complicated and really kind of fantastic. The end of the series didn’t quite go where I expected and got a little goofy (William Shatner will do that to any show) but I liked how they stretched the concept and then brought it back to make it so personal. It was a little wonky in some places but it all worked out in the end.

4. Reign
oh how I love and hate Reign. I love how they rewrite history. How dynamic so many of the characters are. How well cast like 80% of it is (Adelaide Kane is kind of brilliant and Toby Regbo is so much better than a historically accurate Francis could have been and Megan Follows as Catherine de’ Medici is conniving and sort of villain you can’t help but love!). I don’t love so much how it’s sex-saturated and some of the plot twists are kind of obnoxious. But other times the politics and intrigue are fantastic. I think I love it most for that historic, moody tone that it evokes unlike anything else I watch. It’s atmospheric with the setting and the costumes and the music. And plugging that cast into that world works really, really well.

3. Girl Meets World
It’s stupid to say that Girl Meets World is one of my favorites because it’s on the list, right. But it is. The cast is so incredibly spot on. Like no shows are ever that well cast, but this one was. It was charming and adorable and funny. And poignant on occasion. It was full of nostalgia but didn’t drown in it. Every aspect of it was like playing the piano – hitting all the right notes for just long enough and then letting the melody continue on.

2. Nikita
I watched the first three seasons of Nikita live. And rewatched them a few years ago on Netflix. I started rewatching it again a while ago and just finished season 4. And, damn if I don’t love it. Amanda is super annoying (partly because she was badly cast). They shouldn’t have carried her through as the big bad. And it got really convoluted more than a few times. But the characters saved it. Nikita, Birkoff, MICHAEL, Owen, Alex, they were well cast and totally worth following through the series. I mean, Shane West and Devon Sawa – it’s like a 90s teen heartthrob revival. But it wasn’t just the individual characters, it was their dynamics and relationships that really worked really well and make it fun to watch and watch again.

1. The BraveThe Brave makes me both really happy and really sad. Because I love these characters and they were all very well cast. But I’m afraid we’ll only ever get these 13 episodes because the ratings are rather abysmal and it didn’t get picked up for the back 9. But guys, seriously, SERIOUSLY! An elite military unit that does all sorts of different things all over the world each week. Their camaraderie holds the show together and yet it’s so easy to like each one of them individually. Jax is super bad ass (and tough!) and also a few times annoying but she’s easily forgiven. Preach is like mysteriously cool and occasionally funny. McG is exactly as charming as he thinks he is (but not an ounce more). And Amir, I love Amir. I know he’s short but he’s funny and he’s smart and he doesn’t apologize for who he is no matter how much grief they give him. And Mike Vogel as Dalton is a really great leader and holds the show together so well. And the whole thing not happening with Top and Jaz! They talked about constellations!

It needs to come back for a second season because I need more than just these 13 episodes to rewatch. (I’m not joking – I have literally watched the whole series like 3 or 4 times because I’ve only got these 13 episodes).

In part because it would have been fun. But also because I kept getting Rey’s childhood mixed up with Jyn’s from Rogue One. Every time they said she didn’t know who her parents were I thought, “Yes, she does they made her run away when she was little but she knew who they were.” About half way through the movie, I remembered that was Jyn and not Rey.

In the end, though, I really liked what they did with her parents.

spoilers dead ahead »

I kept thinking, “It’s going to be Luke” and then “it’s going to be Han and Leia” back and forth and until she and Kylo Ren are face to face and I thought, “she and Ben are siblings!” But no matter what answer they gave, it would have felt incestuous – this same clan always at the center of this story, the only ones worthy of propelling it along. I sort of love that when Kylo Ren says she has no significance to the story because it opens up this vista of possibility. She creates her own significance, not because of where she comes from but because of who she is. It’s rather beautiful.
And anyone can step out of the shadows and matter in the story.

Someone like Rose. Though Poe and Kylo Ren had more obvious character arcs, she had a subtle and interesting arc from fan to hero. She possessed such beautiful strength and conviction. She also got the best line in the movie. “That’s how we’ll win. Not by destroying what we hate but by saving what we love.”

I think Rian Johnson did a better job of directing than JJ Abrams. The humor wasn’t elegant but the story was. The story transitioned seamlessly and the pace felt much smoother than The Force Awakens. Also, the parallels drawn from the first trilogy were more subtle. And I think in that, they were more effective

parallel spoilers »

Rey leaving Luke the way he left Yoda. Her seeing the conflict in Kylo the way he saw it in Vader. And I loved seeing Yoda again. Seeing his lightheartedness and a different sort of humor compared to when he was training Luke”

They also took some of the perceptions of the story and subverted them and in doing so gave them new meaning – like lifting rocks. They were effective moments and a way of reinvigorating the franchise – really letting it be something new. Except the moment in the beginning that almost felt like Spaceballs. I had forgotten, though, that it was very much in keeping with Poe’s character and his sense of humor. And I appreciate Rian Johnson’s perspective. I’ll give him some leeway for pushing at the boundaries.

“And the humor and the slight goofiness of [Return of the Jedi] also, and kind of the slight free-wheeling feel of it, and how it’s unafraid to have fun, that to me is essential.”

Poe’s story overall was a little too on the nose for my taste but it was good to see him grow in the way he needed and for Leia to pass the baton to him. Especially knowing that she won’t be in the next one. Not really. It lent even more gravitas to her moments in this film.

Maybe the thing I liked the most was the sci-fi of it all. Don’t get me wrong, there ar parts I don’t like – like a lot of the aliens and the sillier elements. But I like the spaceships and blasters and androids and fun stuff. Also, it felt like such a broad universe even than earlier films and fabulous sci-fi that navigated both raw and polished set pieces. The world felt so much more comfortable and lived in. Perhaps because I read a few Star Wars books between this film and the last and so bring that perspective to it. Either way, I enjoy really good sci-fi.

On a blustery late-summer day, Jackman walks into Perry St, a posh SoHo eatery overlooking the Hudson. Even dressed down in a gray T-shirt and cargo pants, the six-foot-three actor with the gleaming smile and jet-black hair is every inch the movie star. He cuts a figure so dazzling that even here, a gathering spot for 1 percenters, patrons will glance over at the corner table where Jackman parks himself, hoping to catch a glimpse of the actor in an unguarded moment.

Jackman looks revived after four months spent traveling with his wife, Deborra-lee Furness, and their kids, Oscar and Ava, to Greece, Italy and their native Australia. He’s ready to plunge back into work. Next week he’ll fly out to Colorado to spend time with former Sen. Gary Hart, whom he’ll be playing in Jason Reitman’s The Front Runner, and then he’s back to New York for four days of reshoots on The Greatest Showman.

Even Jackman sounds surprised that the Barnum musical got made, confessing that he put the odds at less than 50-50 that cameras would ever roll. Yet there was something about the story of this self-made man, who climbed the social ladder by displaying bearded ladies, tattooed men, sword-swallowers and other curiosities in his traveling circus, that he couldn’t shake. He had a kind of chutzpah that was infectious.

“He created this world that no one had even thought possible,” says Jackman. “He really, for me, epitomized the idea that your imagination is your limit in a time where things were very rigid and when the social position you were born into was the one you were stuck in.”

It’s been quite a year for the actor. Not only is Jackman hoofing it up as Barnum, but 2017 also saw him bid farewell to his signature role of Wolverine. Logan, his swan song to the world of mutants, was a critical and commercial smash, a bloody neo-Western that featured the clawed hero beaten up, grappling with his own mortality and staring down the neck of too many empty whiskey bottles.

“This was not a film about selling lunch boxes or action figures,” says director James Mangold. “It was oriented toward adults. The goal was to make something gritty that was also a character piece.”

Jackman says that despite playing Wolverine in nine films over nearly two decades, he had a hard time finding the heart of the cigar-chomping bad boy.

“I wish I’d started playing him like that 17 years ago,” he says. “So there’s some sense of missed opportunity, but when I saw Logan, I sat there and I did have tears in my eyes. The main feeling I had was: “There, that’s the character. I feel like I’ve done it now.” And I was calm and at peace, but I’m going to miss that guy.”

Jackman could be forgiven for feeling uneasy in those initial X-Men films. He was a last-minute substitute who only got the part after Dougray Scott, the original choice, was forced to drop out when Mission: Impossible 2 went over schedule. It’s an example, Jackman says, of the role that fate played in making him a star. He’d auditioned for X-Men nine months before shooting was scheduled to start and failed to land the gig. A chance visit to Hollywood changed his life.

“I was only in L.A. to do the paperwork for the adoption of my son,” Jackman remembers. “I had an agent at the time, and I gave him a ring and said, ‘I’m in town for a week. Is there anything I can read for?’ He said, ‘I’m hearing some whispers about [X-Men] — let me make a few calls.’”

Patrick Stewart vividly remembers meeting Jackman when he came in to do his screen test.

“We’d been shooting for a week or maybe more, and we were running out of stuff to shoot without someone to play Logan. One morning this slender, pleasant-looking guy with a strong Australian accent is introduced to us all,” recounts Stewart. “He spent 15 to 20 minutes chatting, and by the time he was called to do his reading, we’d fallen in love. He charmed everybody.”

Jackman wasn’t as confident. He thought he’d blown the audition. As he left, he whispered to Stewart, “You’re never going to see me again.” Four days later he was stunned when he got a call telling him they needed him to come back.

At a time when Hollywood movie stars are a rare breed indeed, Jackman has leveraged the Wolverine films to bankroll a diverse number of personal projects and has emerged as one of the last of the bankable leading men. It’s a status he’s worked hard to achieve, not just in the care he’s taken in selecting films but in the hours he spends at the gym bulking up to superhero size.

“People always say to me, ‘Why are you in such good shape?’ and I always answer, ‘If I told you that you were going to be on film on a 40-foot screen with your shirt off, you’d be in good shape too.’”

Even as Wolverine has kept him on the A-list, the actor hasn’t felt the need to add another film franchise to his stable. At one point, when the James Bond producers were casting a net to find a replacement for Pierce Brosnan, Jackman rejected their overtures.

“I was about to do X-Men 2 and a call came from my agent asking if I’d be interested in Bond,” recalls Jackman as he dives into a plate of salmon. “I just felt at the time that the scripts had become so unbelievable and crazy, and I felt like they needed to become grittier and real. And the response was: ‘Oh, you don’t get a say. You just have to sign on.’ I was also worried that between Bond and X-Men, I’d never have time to do different things.”

Instead of trying to land a 007-style crowd-pleaser, Jackman has focused on proving he can act without the aid of adamantium claws.

“I always tried to do different things,” he says. “But there was a time between X-Men 3 and the first Wolverine movie when I could see the roles getting smaller. People wanted me to play that kind of hero part exclusively. It felt a little bit claustrophobic.”

To battle typecasting, Jackman has alternated between stage and screen, playing a variety of roles in a number of genres.

“He has such a humongous range,” says Mangold, who has worked with Jackman on three films. “He’s like a fine musical instrument. He can play comedy and go light, but he’s also capable of delivering a performance of tremendous power. He’s got this incredible masculinity and strength and the courage to throw that all away and do a musical on Broadway.”

The Greatest Showman continues the actor’s push to demonstrate his versatility. He proved he could hit some high notes in Les Misérables, but the Barnum story required another approach. It’s more upbeat, with a family-friendly vibe.

Barnum’s edges, such as getting into feuds with family members and his semi-exploitation of people with physical deformities, have been largely sanded off in favor of emphasizing his razzle-dazzle.

“We like to say that we made the movie that Barnum would have liked to make,” Jackman says.

And then there were the technical differences. Whereas the Les Misérables cast members were shot performing their numbers live, The Greatest Showman had the actors sing along to a recording, the approach favored by most movie musicals.

To get in shape for the dancing, the cast did 10 weeks of rehearsals, blocking out elaborate routines that find Jackman, Zac Efron, Michelle Williams and the rest of the actors waltzing across rooftops, juggling liquor bottles and high kicking around a barroom, and doing backflips and jazz hands across the circus stage. They discovered that often their voices were better when they had just gone through a strenuous dance routine, so Gracey had a recording studio built on set to capture them at their best.

“Vocally, sometimes you have those ‘I can do anything’ days, and the next day you’re at 80%, so on those days when you’re feeling great, we would just pop over to the studio and record,” says Jackman. “There’s a couple of bits where I sing notes that I’ve never sung. I couldn’t have done that live.”

Zendaya, the Disney Channel star who plays a lovestruck trapeze artist in the film, marveled at the warmth with which Jackman treated everyone on the set — from his big-name co-stars to the production assistants and gaffers. He also imparted some advice to the 21-year-old actress.

“I was trying to figure out what project to do next, and he told me don’t do it if it doesn’t make you happy,” says Zendaya. “You have to make your own decisions. Don’t listen to other people. Just trust your gut.”

Others who have worked with Jackman echo Zendaya in noting his generosity. He has a politician’s knack for learning names — at lunch, for instance, he engages in a lengthy back-and-forth with a waiter about their respective families, greeting him like an old friend. But he insists that all the stories that talk about how “nice” he is are blowing things out of proportion.

“It’s the way I was brought up,” says Jackman. “My parents always treated people with great respect. My father never yelled, and I admired that. I also genuinely love the family aspect of what we do, and I feel more comfortable being relaxed and myself with everybody, rather than a feeling of ‘Oh, I’m a big actor; you can’t talk to me.’ My way of connecting — maybe people attribute it as being nice, but it’s just being a normal person.”

The Greatest Showman isn’t just a risky commercial proposition, it could also signal a pivot in Jackman’s career. It’s the first time since breaking into the business that he doesn’t have an X-Men film or spinoff on the horizon. That said, Fox doesn’t seem as eager to close the door on future Wolverine adventures as Jackman is.

“We’re going to stay open-minded,” says Snider. “If there’s an inspired way to bring Hugh Jackman back, we’ll know it when we see it, but it would have to be an idea of integrity that we all wanted to do.”

Looking ahead, the actor wants to keep singing. Emboldened by the success of “Hamilton” and “Dear Evan Hansen,” he’s itching to return to Broadway and is developing an original musical.

“A bad musical stinks to high heaven, but when a musical works, there’s nothing like it,” he says. “People are screaming and cheering. Nothing I’ve found has matched it. By the end, as you take the curtain call, there’s no sense you’re in front of strangers. It’s an intimacy you get that’s more intense than you have with people you’ve known for many years. It’s everyone coming together and opening their heart.”

Jackman has loved the theater since he saw a high school production of “Man of La Mancha” starring Hugo Weaving, a classmate at the time. He immediately bought a cast recording of the Broadway production, learning every word. The effect was profound, and growing up, Jackman became determined to have a career onstage. After going through drama school, he felt like he’d earned his big break when he was cast as Curly in the West End production of “Oklahoma!”

“I remember being at the National Theatre doing that show and walking across Waterloo Bridge thinking this is as far as my dreams have got me,” says Jackman. “I was 28, pretty much having reached most of the goals that I’d set for myself. I was always very vague on the Hollywood thing. I felt like if I pinned all my hopes on that, I was destined for disappointment.”

Movie stardom may have come to him despite those initial doubts, but some things haven’t changed. Like Barnum, Jackman comes alive in front of an audience. Even after decades at the center of popular culture, he still gets a thrill in those moments before the curtain rises.

“To this day when I’m doing stage work, I go down to the wings even if I’m not on first to hear the crowd shuffle in,” he says. “It’s the height of excitement as the orchestra starts to play.”

This article has been edited for girlsspeakgeek.com. The complete story appeared in Variety, Dec.2017.

The standalone movies each have (rather) had distinctive styles. An Iron Man film is contemporary and flashy with trusty sidekicks Pepper and Happy and Rhoddy and quippy one-liners. Captain America lost both his sidekicks (the Roaring Commandos) and his wonderful love interest (the incredible Peggy Carter) when he jumped forward in time. Since then his movies haven’t really been his – they’ve served as vehicles for the MCU with Cap as the centerpiece.

And Thor… well a Thor movie has a bit of epic grandiosity and beauty. There’s the sidekick warrior friends to mix things up (with the fabulous Lady Sif). Darcy’s comic relief offsets the epicness without jarring the tone. Jane provides our dose of romance. And Thor kicks ass while Loki makes mischief. It’s a little bit fairy tale and a little bit fantasy set in a sci-fi world. Basically everything I love all wrapped up in one movie.

So you can understand why I didn’t enjoy the jarring shift in tone for Ragnarok. It’s one of the perils of the MCU – the different movies lose what makes them distinctive. A homogenization that all blends into Infinity War. And this one I find particularly distasteful because it took away almost everything I love about Thor movies.

In fact, Ragnarok is more Guardians of the Galaxy with a different cast.
There’s the tough, goofy hero.
The badass chic who doesn’t really want to play along but does anyway.
The bulky, mildly brainless but still fun oaf.
And… well there is no equivalent for Loki. I do really like that Loki plays such an integral role and he’s not the villain this time around.

(Also there’s a whole side note about nobility and humanism but it’s like two lines in the film and I don’t feel like diving into that tonight.)

I get why all the changes happened, but I don’t appreciate how they chose to correct course.

They had the same problem with Thor that they do with Captain America. The first movie turned him from cocky boy to honorable man. From then on, whatever he was in the comics, in the films he was stalwart and heroic and kinda too powerful.

Which makes for a less than interesting character to a lot of people (I like my heroes stalwart but I know I’m in the minority). The biggest problem with the second film is that he is a rather one dimensional hero without an arc. And everybody loved Loki because he’s the funny one. So they had to do something with Thor in this movie to give him dimension and bring the audience back around to him.

I don’t mind them breaking him down; chipping away at his strength bit by bit until he discovers the true source of his power. It’s a timeless story arc and it works well with this character especially because he’s a figurative god, who mostly can’t die, can barely be hurt and can destroy an awful lot of bad guys. Breaking him down makes him more interesting, not just in his own stories but in looking forward to how he fits in with the larger cast of characters (invincible isn’t always play well with others).

But then they still had the problem of making the character more likable. So they wanted to make him funny. And in order to do that, they made him a buffoon. Which I really didn’t like.

I (emphatically) didn’t like the crude humor. And I didn’t like him being unintentionally goofy for a quick laugh. I didn’t like the dramatic shift from amusingly blunt grandeur to really base humor.

Which is not to say I think the movie shouldn’t have been funny. When you already have sort sort of absurd world with Hela and her giant headdress, and the horned flaming alien who is going to destroy the world… you either embrace it and have fun with the whole thing or you try to make the audience take it seriously. I’m glad they had fun with it.

Because otherwise Ragnarok would start to feel like a DC movie and no one wants that.

It’s my running thread with Ragnarok – I like what they did but I really don’t like how they did it. Thor isn’t silly. Or, he didn’t used to be. He wasn’t goofy or ridiculous. And still he was funny in moments. And moments were enough because his films were fun but they weren’t comedies. The humor in this doesn’t fit him as well as it fits Peter Quill.

Or it didn’t used to. It’s been a gradual move. They began to introduce vaguely self-deprecating humor to him in Avengers (of course, because Joss Whedon wrote it). The Dark World gave him moments of levity that completely fit with his character. But then Age of Ultron introduced a moment or two of this ridiculous humor. It didn’t quite feel consonant but it was only a line or two. Ragnarok is a lot of the movie with him saying these ridiculous things and doing these gags that they’ll keep doing because now they’ve re-centered his character around that humor.

I’m not saying it’s not funny. But it feels like the character has jumped the rails.

And I think they could have made him a more dimensional character in other ways that felt more true. Especially, if they hadn’t jettisoned the entire supporting cast from the earlier films.

I know, I should be the first to celebrate Jane’s absence. I’ve always said that Natalie Portman and Chris Hemsworth have no chemistry. And that the romance of the first film is unsupported and hollow. But you know, I still like Jane as a character. And I really liked Darcy. Loved Lady Sif, especially as a rival to Jane. But they’re all gone. And we’re supposed to be placated because there’s other strong girls to fill those gaps. But they don’t. We have zero emotional connection or history with any of these new characters and while Valkyrie is cool and all, she isn’t enough. She lacks the history and nobility of Lady Sif and the adorable humor of Darcy and the brilliance and tenacity of Jane. It would have been so much better to add her fierceness and loyalty as a compliment to the rest of them rather than a replacement.

But most of all, I wanted to watch a Thor movie. And I didn’t get to. I can’t complain too much because it is a good movie in a lot of ways. It’s a bright, colorful, funny, action-packed Marvel movie.

I’m sure I’ll enjoy it when I’m done being disappointed (except the crude humor, I won’t ever enjoy that). And I suppose I can always watch The Dark World if I want to see a Thor movie.

]]>http://girlsspeakgeek.com/thor-ragnarok/feed/0Emma Watson, Rebel Bellehttp://girlsspeakgeek.com/emma-watson-vanity-fair-march-2017/
Fri, 10 Mar 2017 21:49:12 +0000http://girlsspeakgeek.com/magnate/?p=344Since her years as Hermione ended, Emma Watson has fought to assert her own identity. Now that she has found her voice—most notably as a U.N. ambassador—she’s revamping a classic stereotype, the Disney princess, in Beauty and the Beast. Watson talks to Vanity Fair about her metamorphosis from child star to leading woman.

Emma Watson and I are standing on the 23rd Street platform of an uptown-bound E train in New York City and we’re littering. Literally. And literature-ly. The 26-year-old actress is scattering hardcover copies of Maya Angelou’s book Mom & Me & Mom throughout the station—tucking them between pipes, placing them on benches, atop the emergency call box—in hopes that New York commuters will pick them up and put down their smartphones. This display of civil disobedience was conceived by Books on the Underground, a London-based organization that plants books on public transportation for travelers to discover. “We’re being ninjas,” she says with a conspiratorial grin as she digs in a big black rucksack of books. “If there were anyone to be a ninja for, it’d be Maya Angelou.”

Watson is one of the most famous women in the world, the child star who skyrocketed to global fame at the age of 11 playing brainy Hermione Granger. Next month, she’s back on the big screen as Belle in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast—which broke the record for most viewed new movie trailer. (That’s 127 million views in its first 24 hours.) But today she’s makeup-free, her hair shoved into a bun, and she’s wearing a nondescript dark wool coat over a baggy black sweater, completely blending in with New York’s distracted mass-transit masses.

“It’s good that we’re spreading a little bit of love,” she says. As she removes the last book, a train pulls into the station. She hops in, places it on a seat, hops out, and watches from the platform as the doors close and a young man inquisitively picks it up.

Aboveground, over coffee at a nearby café, Watson explains why she thinks reading is “sacred.” There’s the obvious, professional reason: Harry Potter was a literary sensation before becoming the blockbuster franchise that made her famous and a millionaire many times over. But books are also rooted in her deepest personal experiences. “Books gave me a way to connect with my father,” she says. “Some of my most precious and treasured moments . . .” She trails off and, unexpectedly for someone who is known for her composure, tears up. Her parents divorced when she was young. “I just remember him reading to me before bed and how he used to do all the different voices. I grew up on film sets, and books were my connection to the outside world. They were my connection to my friends back at school because if I was reading what they were reading we’d have something in common. Later in life, they became an escape, a means of empowerment, a friend I could rely on.”

I first met Watson, Hollywood’s latest exception to the rule that all child stars inevitably flame out, during Paris Fashion Week more than a decade ago, when she was still a teenager and filming the fourth of the eight Harry Potter films. It was both a homecoming for the actress—she was born in Paris to British parents and lived there until she was five—and a symbol of her maturity on-screen. She was there to attend her first-ever fashion show, at Chanel, which was a big deal considering that up until then she had shopped in the bridesmaid section at Harrods or borrowed dresses from her stepmother for movie premieres.

She was a shy teenager, but friendly, intelligent, and down to earth. Watson is described as much the same today: “She’s way more like a real person than a movie star,” according to Gloria Steinem, who became a friend when Watson reached out to discuss the changing face of feminist activism. Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, who met Watson backstage at a performance of the musical, sums it up: “She played this very smart, conscious, noble wizard—and then somehow we had the good fortune that she became a smart, conscious, noble woman.”

Emma and I got to know each other, and I visited her on the sets of the last two Harry Potter films. But as the Potter train pulled into its last station, I noticed the clouds of melancholy forming over her fairy-tale life. “I’d walk down the red carpet and go into the bathroom,” she remembers of the last few premieres. “I had on so much makeup and these big, fluffy, full-on dresses. I’d put my hands on the sink and look at myself in the mirror and say, ‘Who is this?’ I didn’t connect with the person who was looking back at me, and that was a very unsettling feeling.”

What few people knew when she enrolled at Brown University in 2009 was that she had a desire to give up acting and walk away from Hollywood altogether. “I was finding this fame thing was getting to a point of no return,” she remembers. “I sensed if this was something I was ever going to step away from it was now or never.” She loved performance and telling stories, but she had to reckon with the consequences of “winning the lottery,” as she calls getting the part of Hermione, when she was nine years old and literally still losing baby teeth. As an adult, “it dawned on me that this is what you’re really signing up for.”

The question most people ask when a celebrity moans about being famous: If you hate the fanfare so much, why keep making movies? Watson asked herself that all the time. “I’ve been doing this since I was 10 or 11, and I’ve often thought, I’m so wrong for this job because I’m too serious; I’m a pain in the ass; I’m difficult; I don’t fit,” she says. “But as I’ve got older, I’ve realized, No! Taking on those battles, the smaller ones and the bigger ones, is who I am.”

She recently found the courage to say no to selfie-seekers. “For me, it’s the difference between being able to have a life and not. If someone takes a photograph of me and posts it, within two seconds they’ve created a marker of exactly where I am within 10 meters. They can see what I’m wearing and who I’m with. I just can’t give that tracking data.” Sometimes, she’ll decline a photo but offer up an autograph or even a chat—“I’ll say, ‘I will sit here and answer every single Harry Potter fandom question you have but I just can’t do a picture’ ”—and much of the time people don’t bother. “I have to carefully pick and choose my moment to interact,” she says. “When am I a celebrity sighting versus when am I going to make someone’s freakin’ week? Children I don’t say no to, for example.”

I tell Watson I’ve watched other actors, like Reese Witherspoon, walk down the street and happily pose with fans—and suddenly it becomes clear that the fans of Sweet Home Alabama are different from Harry Potter fans. It’s something Watson is deeply aware of. “I have met fans that have my face tattooed on their body. I’ve met people who used the Harry Potter books to get through cancer. I don’t know how to explain it, but the Harry Potter phenomenon steps into a different zone. It crosses into obsession. A big part of me coming to terms with it was accepting that this is not your average circumstances.” (Since the first movie premiered, in 2001, when Watson was 11, there have been numerous incidents with stalkers.) “People will say to me, ‘Have you spoken to Jodie Foster or Natalie Portman? They would have great advice for you on how to grow up in the limelight.’ I’m not saying it was in any way easy on them, but with social media it’s a whole new world. They’ve both said technology has changed the game.” When she was at Brown, Watson went to a Harvard football game and The Harvard Voice, a student magazine, live-tweeted as its staff stalked her at the stadium. She’s not exaggerating her security concerns, either. She purchased her house sight unseen over a Skype call with a real-estate agent because it had a paparazzi-proof entrance. “Privacy for me is not an abstract idea,” she says.

Watson has a boyfriend, though she adamantly, vehemently refuses to expound on him. (The Internet says he’s called Mack, he’s handsome, and he works in tech in Silicon Valley.) “I want to be consistent: I can’t talk about my boyfriend in an interview and then expect people not to take paparazzi pictures of me walking around outside my home. You can’t have it both ways.” She sits back and wonders if she should finish this thought, and eventually she does: “I’ve noticed, in Hollywood, who you’re dating gets tied up into your film promotion and becomes part of the performance and the circus. I would hate anyone that I were with to feel like they were in any way part of a show or an act.”

Back in college, Watson was like most 20-year-olds, struggling to carve out her own identity, only she did it in front of a rabid fan base and a never-ending celebrity-news cycle. She made international headlines when she chopped Hermione’s long locks into a closely shorn pixie. To this day Watson declares, “It’s the sexiest I’ve ever felt.”

She got into yoga and meditation; being the Type A person she is, though, she wasn’t content just doing it. “Typical Emma,” says Harry Potter producer David Heyman, who has remained a close friend. “She had to become a certified meditation teacher.”

Watson shied away from doing additional big-budget studio films and instead focused on smaller movies, like The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012), and sought out auteur directors, like Sofia Coppola with The Bling Ring (2013) and Darren Aronofsky with Noah (2014). She turned down big offers: from lucrative cosmetics deals to critically acclaimed scripts. (Emma Stone’s role in La La Land was reportedly developed for Watson.) “There have been hard moments in my career when I’ve had an agent or a movie producer say, ‘You are making a big mistake,’” Watson says. “But what’s the point of achieving great success if you feel like you’re losing your freakin’ mind? I’ve had to say, ‘Guys, I need to go back to school,’ or ‘I just need to go home and hang out with my cats.’ People have looked at me and been like, ‘Is she insane?’ But, actually, it’s the opposite of insane.”

What ultimately helped clarify her purpose was reading. Last January, Watson started Our Shared Shelf, her bi-monthly online book club. She used Twitter (more than 23 million followers) to crowd-source the name.

All About Love: New Visions by Bell Hooks, was Watson’s March 2016 book-club selection. Watson traveled to Berea, Kentucky, near the Appalachian Mountains, to meet Hooks, and the two quickly struck up a friendship based on, in the words of the writer, “the belief in the primacy of a spiritual foundation for life.”

“In so many ways she’s not like we think of movie stars,” Hooks told me. “She’s [part of] a very different, new breed who are interested in being whole and having a holistic life, as opposed to being identified with just wealth and fame.”

In early 2014, U.N. Women, the United Nations’ department of gender equality, contacted Watson about becoming an ambassador. Everything clicked: she could focus the prying eyes of the world onto causes that she was passionate about, namely a new initiative called HeForShe, which aims to get men to co-sign on feminist issues. I was in the audience at the General Assembly on September 20, 2014, when Watson, elegantly and discreetly wrapped in a simple silver-gray Dior coatdress, stepped onto the podium and spoke passionately about women’s rights for a little more than 10 minutes. Her battle cry ended with: “I am inviting you to step forward, to be seen, and to ask yourself, If not me, who? If not now, when?”

“I used to be scared of words like ‘feminism,’ ‘patriarchy,’ ‘imperialist.’ But I’m not anymore,” Watson says.

“It was not typical for U.N. Women to have a celebrity give a keynote address,” says the executive director of U.N. Women. “We needed a new messenger to break new ground for us. We didn’t want to just speak to the converted.” Watson blushed at the standing ovation and beamed as then secretary-general Ban Ki-moon became the first person to officially sign on to HeForShe. The U.N. Women Web site crashed in the aftermath of the media blitz that followed—“A good problem to have!,” Mlambo-Ngcuka says—and her speech made headline news around the world, from CNN to fashion blogs. Men like Hugh Jackman, Jared Leto, Harry Styles, Russell Crowe, and Eddie Redmayne aligned themselves with HeForShe. Feminists worldwide heralded their newest spokesperson: “For a time, there was a conversation about whether ‘feminism’ was a good thing or a bad thing,” Mlambo-Ngcuka says. Watson’s speech “gave us the word back.”

The first time Watson saw the final cut of Beauty and the Beast she took along her mother, Jacqueline, and Gloria Steinem to a screening in London. She wanted her mother’s approval, but she needed Steinem’s. “I couldn’t care less if I won an Oscar or not if the movie didn’t say something that I felt was important for people to hear,” Watson says.

Specifically, she must have wanted assurance that her portrayal of a Disney princess didn’t conflict with the ideals of a feminist.

“It was fascinating that her activism could be so well mirrored by the film,” Steinem says, noting that Belle uses reading as a way to expand her world. “It’s this love of literature that first bonds the Beauty to the Beast, and also what develops the entire story.”

This is a new Belle, much of it by Watson’s design. “I was like, ‘The first shot of the movie cannot be Belle walking out of this quiet little town carrying a basket with a white napkin in it,’ ” she says. “ ‘We need to rev things up!’ ” In the original Disney movie, Belle is an assistant to her inventor father, but here she’s a creator in her own right, developing a “modern washing machine that allows her to sit and read.” Watson worked with costume designer Jacqueline Durran to incorporate pockets in her costume that are “kind of like a tool belt.” Another thing: in the animated version, Belle is on and off horses yet wearing a long dress and silk slippers, which didn’t sit well with Watson. Bloomers were created and Belle’s first pair of riding boots. “The original sketches had her in her ballet shoes,” Watson says, “which are lovely—don’t get me wrong—but she’s not going to be able to do anything terribly useful in ballet shoes in the middle of a French provincial village.”

Maturing from Hermione to Belle is a true coming-of-age story for her. “When I finished the film, it kind of felt like I had made that transition into being a woman on-screen,” she says. Belle is “absolutely a Disney princess, but she’s not a passive character—she’s in charge of her own destiny.” What’s more intriguing, however, is how Watson observed a similarly strict code in her real life, too, from what parts she plays to what she reads in bed at night and what clothes she puts on in the morning.

“Emma has an incredible sense of integrity,” says Livia Firth, the founder of Eco-Age, a sustainable-fashion consulting firm. “You can’t marry activism and then do something in your life that is not in agreement.” Firth praises Watson’s choice of dress for last year’s Met Gala: it was designed by Calvin Klein and made almost entirely from recycled plastic bottles. For her Beauty and the Beast press tour, Watson created a PowerPoint presentation that her stylist sent fashion designers. It included a questionnaire about how their garments are produced, what their impact is on the environment, and the moral reason why she should wear one on the red carpet.

As Steinem honors Watson’s high moral standards and relentless activism, I ask her if there’s a risk of becoming, well, annoying to the general public. Is she too much of an ethical Goody Two-Shoes? Steinem is not amused. “Let me ask you something: If you did a story on a young male actor who was very private and involved in activism, would you think he was too severe or serious? Why do women always have to be listeners? Emma is interested in the world, she is caring, and though she is active she is also joyous and informed.” At this point I’m backpedaling—“I think she’s wonderful!”—but Steinem still digs in. “It’s possible to be both serious and fun, you know. That response is why men will ask a woman, ‘Why don’t you just smile, honey?’ ”

The actor Kevin Kline, who plays Belle’s father in Beauty and the Beast, agrees with Steinem. “When someone has a feminist point of view, we tend to think she’s no fun at all,” he says. “But a feminist can be feminine, delicate, vulnerable, sweet—and still demand to be taken seriously. Emma fits the bill perfectly.” A big grin forms on his face as he asks, “Has anyone told you about the dancing scene yet?”

In the film, there’s an over-the-top ball, which required the entire cast and scores of extras to waltz in period costumes for hours and hours. “Ater a long, long day, suddenly Pharrell Williams’s song ‘Happy’ comes on, blasting, and everyone just starts jumping around,” Kline recalls. “It became kind of a wrap party, really celebratory. And I asked, ‘Who did that?’ It was Emma.”

This article has been edited for girlsspeakgeek.com. The complete story appeared in Vanity Fair, Mar.2017.

]]>Chris Pratt’s Call to Stardomhttp://girlsspeakgeek.com/chris-pratt-vanity-fair-february-2017/
Sun, 12 Feb 2017 16:45:09 +0000http://girlsspeakgeek.com/magnate/?p=339Chris Pratt’s rise to fame is so improbable he sees it as divinely ordained: the friend who sent him a ticket to Hawaii, the stranger who led him to a church, the actress he waited on at Bubba Gump Shrimp. Recalling the leaps of faith that turned him from a door-to-door salesman into a box-office king, Pratt considers what he has to prove now.

Chris Pratt wanted to cook me lunch. And not just any lunch—a lunch made from an animal that Pratt himself had killed, in Texas, where the mesquite blooms and the wild boar does not care nor even know that the handsome man sighting the scope of a .25-caliber Winchester is one of the biggest movie stars in the world. And Pratt did kill that animal. And dressed it and shipped it back to this beautiful house in the Hollywood Hills, where he lives with his wife, actress Anna Faris, and their four-year-old son, Jack. But something went punk at the butcher, and the meat was going to take a lot longer to prepare than Pratt had expected—“Most of it’s being turned into jerky anyway”—so the steak Pratt was basting on the counter in his modern kitchen had in fact been purchased at Whole Foods. “I could tell you this is the boar I shot, and who would know, but, dude, I’m not gonna lie. This is not that boar, but this boar stands for that boar.”

Do you consider yourself a good cook?
Pratt laughed. He was wearing a flannel shirt and jeans and had let his beard grow to stubble. No shoes, just socks. He’s a big guy, six feet three in boots, in shape, and has the knock-around ease of a regular guy drinking campfire tequila.
“I can make three things,” he told me. “Meat. Omelets. Fajitas. This here I’m making is a wild-boar taco. I got the recipe from my brother-in-law, because that guy knows everything.”

It was a Sunday. Pratt seemed relaxed, probably because he’d decided to take a hiatus. For a decade, he’s done nothing but work, stumbling from film to film after making his name on television. He played Andy Dwyer, the friendly chubby boyfriend on Parks and Recreation, before executing a miraculous switch to action hero, in 2014’s Guardians of the Galaxy. It’d be like George Costanza turning into Harrison Ford. And Pratt is compared to Harrison Ford. Though Pratt is funnier. Looking for the proper mix, I’d say Bruce Willis with a dash of Seth Rogen. He can play deadpan wiseass better than just about anyone. He’s on the short list of actors who can do pretty much whatever they want.

Pratt’s decision to take a break results partly from some advice given to him by a childhood hero, Jim Carrey. “There’s very few people in the world who I can expect to understand exactly what I’m going through,” Pratt said. “Jim Carrey is one of them.” Pratt took Carrey aside at a party last year and basically asked, What do I do now? Carrey said, “There’s going to be a point in life where you’re going to have to prove that your family is more important to you than show business.” It’s put the actor in a mood to ruminate, recollect, make connections. At 37 years old, Chris Pratt can finally see his life as a story.

Big Time, Small Town

I asked Pratt about his father. In articles, he comes across as a kind of Paul Bunyan character.

Was he really a goldminer?

Pratt was chopping parsley. I suddenly understood why he’d chosen to cook during our interview. It gave him something to do with his hands while his mind wandered.

“He was a taconite miner in Minnesota,” Pratt told me. “He worked in iron ore; that’s a big industry. We moved to Alaska so he could work in gold mines. That’s how we operated as a family—we’d just make a decision, pick up, and move.”

After a few years, when Pratt was six or seven, the family settled in Lake Stevens, Washington, the Seattle exurb that became Pratt’s beloved hometown. It was nuts for wrestling. Like football in Texas, every kid sized up from eight or nine by the high-school coach. Pratt would captain his high-school team. At one point, he was a top wrestler in the state. When I asked if he’d ever had his ass kicked—because having your ass kicked is character-building—he nodded sadly. “I’d be devastated,” he said. “Because I put everything into it, and if a kid beat me . . . but it’s good. It’s a great sport because you have to stand there and shake a guy’s hand. You look him in the eye, then his arm gets raised. No excuses. You get beat and think, F**!!! Then come back and wrestle him again. I wrestled the same kids for 10 years.”

I asked Pratt if he played high-school football. He has the aura of big-time, small-town. He told me that his father had been a star player in his own day. “He was bigger than me, much bigger, and he’d light up the stadium when he carried the ball. He wore number 76, and for years I thought the gas station was named for him. So of course I played.

“I was a great football player,” he said, then stopped and looked at my recorder. “Don’t say I said that. But, dude, I was a great football player. I was a fullback and an inside linebacker. I never had the speed to play college. But I loved it. I don’t think anything will ever take its place. The competition, the team. You get a little bit of that in acting. You get it with action films. You have to train, be in shape. I think I learned more about how to handle myself as an actor playing sports than I ever did in theater.”

Theater? How did that start?

Pratt’s brother. And he’s important. He’s got a sister who still lives in Lake Stevens, but Pratt’s brother, three years ahead in school, is the key figure in his life. If you were to look at a picture of the Pratts in the early years, you’d see Dan junior, known as Cully, doing something heroic—he’s now a cop—with Chris in the distance, wide-eyed. “He was hands down the best big brother anyone could ask for, super-supportive and always helped me, and loved me, and took care of me,” said Pratt. “We spent our entire childhood, eight hours a day, wrestling. One Christmas, he was in a play, a musical, and sang, and it knocked everyone’s socks off. My mom was crying. And I was like, ‘That’s what I want to do.’ ”

By senior year, Pratt was wrestling, playing football, starring in plays, and writing and acting in every kind of assembly. “We did Grease and we did Michael Jackson’s Thriller and ripped off S.N.L. sketches,” he told me. In other words, Pratt was that rarest of figures. The high-school Renaissance man. Friend of the outcast, confidant of the powerful. Neither bullied nor bullying. An exchange between Pratt and his wrestling coach has been repeated until it’s become legend. According to Entertainment Weekly, the coach asked Pratt what he planned to do with his life: “I was like, ‘I don’t know, but I know I’ll be famous and I know I’ll make a s* ton of money.’”

When I tried to drill down on this he talked more about his father. He’d been a high-school star and lived off that for the rest of his life. “I guess that’s what I planned to do,” said Pratt.

During Pratt’s senior year, his father was diagnosed with M.S., which runs in the family. “He was beyond wanting to accept help,” said Pratt. “If left untreated, it can be devastating, and he left it untreated. For a couple of years he had symptoms, I think, but didn’t say anything. Every once in a while he’d wear an eye patch and say he got something in his eye at work, but it was because he had double vision,” a symptom of M.S.

Dan Pratt Sr. died in 2014. When I asked Pratt if his father got to enjoy his son’s success, he said, “Some of it. He watched a lot of TV in his final years. That’s pretty much all he did, just sat in front of a TV. So, yeah, I think it made him proud, and it was cool that I got to find some way to connect with him, because he was a hard man to connect with.”

Pratt’s mother worked in the Safeway—there was not a lot of money. The Pratts lost their house while Chris was in high school. They rented a place until he graduated, then moved into a trailer. They offered Chris a sleeping loft in a shed out back, but he became roommates with a friend instead. He was thinking of joining the military, but, again, his brother: “He ended up going into the army and told me not to. I think he saw something in me. I was a peculiar kid. I was very much an individual and happy to be an individual. I dressed funny and was comfortable in my own skin. I don’t know. I never did ask him why.”

Pratt waited tables and took classes at a local community college, including a theater course. “I did a scene—something I wrote—and the teacher took me aside and said, ‘You should think about doing this professionally.’ He saw something.”

Pratt didn’t finish a full year. “It felt exactly like high school except I had to pay for it,” he explained, “and, for a kid living hand to mouth, that didn’t make sense. So I got a job as a salesman going door-to-door.”

Wait. What?
“Yeah, I saw an ad in the newspaper.”

The ad went something like: Do you dig rock ‘n’ roll and making money?

Of course, the answer to both questions was yes.

Flair For The Dramatic

Pratt was arranging wild boar on a tray and sliding it into the oven as he talked. “Hey, dude, does 300 degrees sound right to you?”

I told him it sounded low. Everything in my house goes in at least 350. He called his brother-in-law, the one who knows everything, to check. “You know what would make a great end to this story?” said Pratt, laughing. “If we ended up in the hospital with food poisoning.”

I asked about that sales job.

“I was selling coupons for things like oil changes or trips to a spa,” said Pratt, who told me it didn’t really matter what he was selling because a salesman only has one product: himself. “I was great at that,” he said. He got absorbed in this new gig, walking through town, making the same pitch again and again. It turned out to be perfect training for a future life of audition and rejection. “That’s why I believe in God and the divine,” he told me. “I feel like it was perfectly planned. People talk about rejection in Hollywood. I’m like, ‘You’re outta your f**in’ mind. Did you ever have someone sic their dog on you at an audition?” ’

If you sold enough coupons, you got to run an office somewhere in the country—you’d become a manager, in other words, moving pieces around the board. That was the carrot Pratt was chasing. It took 15 months, but he finally got it. Given charge of an office outside Denver, he left Lake Stevens in the way of a kid leaving home to meet his destiny. What a strange interlude for a leading man: this drab complex outside this strange city, salesmen fighting over the Glengarry leads. “We rented an apartment,” Pratt told me. “I slept on the balcony. And partied. I wasn’t even 21.” The novelty wore off as the truth became plain. He’d been caught in someone else’s moneymaking scheme. As the old wisdom advises, when you sit at the poker table, look for the sucker. If you can’t identify him, leave—it’s you. Pratt called his boss one morning. “ ‘This is too much for me,’ “ he said. “ ‘I’m more in debt every month. I’m so depressed. I can’t do it.’ And she said, ‘I just want you to know, Chris, that there is nothing else out there.’ “

Pratt’s mother sent him a ticket. Two years had gone by, and he was back in Lake Stevens, exactly where he’d started. Left on his own, he might have followed the classic trajectory—hero at 18, relic by 45.

So what happened?
“I was rescued.” As he said this, he stuck a fork in the oven and came at me with a piece of meat.
“Try this and tell me the truth. We can always drive down to Soho House and eat there.”

I chewed slowly.

He said it again. “Tell me the truth.”

I did not want to tell him the truth—because I liked him and did not want to go to Soho House. If I did tell the truth, I’d have said, “It tastes like burning.” Instead I said, “Good!”

He closed the oven, went on. “One of my best friends heard I’d been floundering. I had everyone convinced I’d been off doing this great sales job and making money, and I wasn’t. I had no prospects, no job, was still sort of riding the glory of high school. He saw that and bought me a ticket to Hawaii, where he’d been living.”

Pratt remembers what it was like when he first got to the island, the green hills and blue sea, how all that beauty contrasted with his mood. “My friends picked me up in a van. They had a cooler of beer. But I was not in a great place.”

Pratt got a job at Bubba Gump Shrimp. For Pratt, it was like door-to-door, a kind of acting; he threw himself into entertaining tables of kids and conventioneers.

Were you good at that job?
“I was Gumper of the year,” he told me. “They gave me the award. I got my name on a plaque. It was the kind of place that . . . Did you ever see the movie Waiting . . . ? Anna’s in that movie, and she’s great. Or Office Space? Did you ever see that? You know how [Jennifer Aniston] can’t handle the f**in’ flair? Well, I was a monster with the flair.”

Pratt was living on the beach. There was a van with a couch, a tent with a blanket. On its face, it was an idyll, five or six friends, none older than 20, never out of earshot of the breakers, yet Pratt was lost, the perfection of the locale making his estrangement only more keen. Like neon in the daytime, or a blue note on a bright day.

“I was sitting outside a grocery store—we’d convinced someone to go in and buy us beer. This is Maui. And a guy named Henry came up and recognized something in me that needed to be saved. He asked what I was doing that night, and I was honest. I said, ‘My friend’s inside buying me alcohol.’ ‘You going to go party?’ he asked. ‘Yeah.’ ‘Drink and do drugs? Meet girls, fornication?’ I was like, ‘I hope so.’ I was charmed by this guy, don’t know why. He was an Asian dude, maybe Hawaiian, in his 40s. It should’ve made me nervous but didn’t. I said, ‘Why are you asking?’ He said, ‘Jesus told me to talk to you . . .’ At that moment I was like, I think I have to go with this guy. He took me to church. Over the next few days I surprised my friends by declaring that I was going to change my life.”

O.K. Let’s stop for a moment. Because this is strange and so distant from what we expect of a movie star, especially of the clever, slapdash, wise-guy variety. But everyone needs a story to make sense of their life. Even the most successful. The extreme demands explanation. For Pratt, success, so extreme it scared him, is explained by metaphysical intervention. Which caused him to take control. In that moment, he yielded. His path has been clear ever since.

The Outsider

One day, and this was the key development, Rae Dawn Chong, an actress and the daughter of the great stoner Tommy Chong—she’d reached a professional peak in 1985 when she starred opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger in Commando—walked into Bubba Gump Shrimp. “She was with her producing partner,” said Pratt. “I think they were on vacation in Kihei. I wasn’t even supposed to take a shift that day. I was always giving away my shifts because I didn’t have much overhead. I lived in a van. But it was like I had a premonition. I always wanted to go to Hollywood. I just didn’t know I was going to get there.”

She asks for his phone number. He does not have a phone—he lives in a van—so gives her the number of his friend Michael Jackson (not that Michael Jackson). She leaves a message the next day, but Michael Jackson forgets about it. Then Michael Jackson remembers. He tells Pratt, “Dawn or some Chinese chick or something . . . you got a message.”

Pratt picked up the script from Chong. It was a comedy called Cursed Part 3. There were no Parts 1 and 2. It was a film about a film crew being haunted while making a film about a haunting.

Chong stopped Pratt halfway through his audition.

She said, “We’re going to use you.”

Did you get a big part?
“Yeah,” he said, “I was the lead.”

When Pratt learned the movie would be shot in L.A., he told Chong he’d have to bow out. He couldn’t afford a plane ticket. “I had 60 bucks,” he told me. “And she was like, ‘Sweetie, we’ll fly you there.’ ”

The movie took 10 days to shoot and was never released. When I asked Pratt to describe it, he hemmed and hawed, searching for the words, washing his hands in the sink as he did so, then, in the way of a person who’s decided, F** it, I’ll just tell the truth, said, “It was the worst movie I’d ever seen.”

So what was its historical function?
It got Pratt a screen credit and a manager and a reel. It got him into the game. “The whole reason that movie came along was just so I could be brought to Hollywood.”

What did you look like back then?
Because Pratt became known as a lovable chub in the office down the hall, I was curious about how he was first presented. “I looked exactly like Heath Ledger,” he said. “I had long blond hair, still bleached out, Hawaiian . . . That’s what people were always saying: Man, you look just like Heath Ledger. Then I saw Heath Ledger on the cover of Vanity Fair, and I thought, Hey, I do look just like that guy.”

I asked Pratt what life was like in Los Angeles in those first years. He talked about living cheaply, waiting tables, taking small roles in big movies and big roles in small movies. (He met his wife while playing her love interest in Take Me Home Tonight, circa 2007.) “I was an outsider, no connections, no nepotism, nothing, a complete foreigner to Hollywood.”

The breakthrough came with Everwood, in 2002, which Pratt describes as “a single-camera, dramatic show for the WB. It went four seasons and was absolutely life-changing. That’s when I became an actor, and that was the first time I’d ever got into money, real money.”

Most people probably got to know Pratt as Andy Dwyer on Parks and Recreation. It was supposed to be a one-episode deal, but the character took off. Pratt gained weight while shooting the first season—partly because he thought it worked for the character, partly because he’d just been married and people tend to fatten up in those first, blissful years. He did not consider the downside—other than lethargy and trouble breathing—until he auditioned to play Oakland A’s first-baseman and catcher Scott Hatteberg in 2011’s Moneyball. “That was the first time I heard someone say, ‘We’re not gonna cast you—you’re too fat.’ So I decided to drop the weight, like in wrestling. I couldn’t afford a trainer, so it was all running and crash-dieting and cutting alcohol.”

Pratt had always wanted to play an action hero but did not think he could pull it off.

What changed your mind?
“Zero Dark Thirty,” he said. “That’s the first time I bulked up, got into great shape because I was playing a navy SEAL.”

Nervous when he sat down to watch the film, he came away with a new view of himself. “I was like, I buy that guy,” he said. “I’m SEAL Team Six in that movie, and I felt like it was real. I can do this. I can play those roles.

“Guardians had come around, and I passed,” Pratt said. “James Gunn [the director] passed on me, too. When they announced it, I looked it up and saw a list of the top 20 dudes in Hollywood who might play Peter Quill. I was not on that list. I did not want to go in and embarrass myself. My agent said, ‘Guardians is everything you’ve been saying you want to do.’ I said, ‘F**, you’re right.’ But I’m going to go in there and do exactly what I mean by action comedy. My brand of stuff. Brash. Honest. I played the room. Jim Gunn, the way he tells it is like this: ‘Who do we have next? Chris Pratt? What the f**? I said we weren’t going to audition the chubby guy from Parks and Rec.’ ‘Well, he’s already here.’ They’d tested probably 10 people, spent a lot of money, and James wasn’t convinced on anyone yet. When I finished [my scene], he said, ‘Do you have any questions?’ I was like, ‘Are you f**in’ crazy? Tell me everything.’ I gave him my Peter Quill version of an answer. Once you get smart about auditioning, you learn to audition before they say ‘Action.’ You walk into the room as the character. You let them think the person you are is close to the character they want. You make them think you already are that guy. Gunn was like, ‘Damn, this is it.’”

Pratt was alone when he saw the movie the first time, in a theater rented for that purpose. “When it started, I was like, This is f**in’ awesome! Then I saw the first scene of myself dancing and kicking rats, and I was like, Oh, disaster. This movie is gonna suck. I was just so hypercritical of myself. Then the next scene comes on and you see Rocket and Groot, and I was like, Wait a minute—this movie might be really f**in’ good.”

That movie changed everything for Pratt. In a moment, he went from that to this. “I made a genre jump,” he said, “a category jump, some kind of jump.”

He cemented this image in Jurassic World, in which he not only played the Harrison Ford-type role but played it in a Steven Spielberg property.

When I asked Pratt why he did Passengers, he said, “It’s the best script I’ve ever read.”

A Country Boy Can Survive

Pratt set the table as he talked. Tacos, rice, peppers. He called his son and the nanny in to eat

Just before we sat to eat, he got on his knees and had the rest of us get on our knees, and we held hands, and he thanked God for the food and the life, and he even put in a word for the Cubs. At the end of the meal, he poured shots of tequila. He’d been given a case after Jurassic World. I noticed a guitar on the wall. When I asked about it, Pratt said, “Let me show you the good guitars.” He went upstairs and came back with two acoustics—a Taylor and a beautiful Gibson, which he’d played while guest-hosting Saturday Night Live, in 2014. He picked it up and began to sing “Lady,” a Kenny Rogers hit just as cheesy as AM radio. Then we played together—“Up on Cripple Creek” and the Hank Williams Jr. tune “A Country Boy Can Survive.” He strummed a few chords, then talked about a guest appearance he’d recently made on his wife’s CBS sitcom, Mom. He’d learned the Kenny Rogers tune so he could sing it on that show. “I played it, then we kissed,” he told me. “Normally, when you do a kissing scene, it’s awkward, and when it’s done you say, ‘Are you O.K.?’ But this was different. After they yelled ‘Cut,’ we laughed and just kept on kissing.”

This article has been edited for girlsspeakgeek.com. The complete story appeared in Vanity Fair, Feb.2017.

I’ve been interested in seeing Passengers since I first saw the trailer. Shiny sci-fi with a bit of romance, a bit of fun and a bit of danger. Even a mystery to unravel. Plus a chance for two endearing actors to prove themselves in a starring vehicle.

Then after hearing whispers that critics weren’t kind, I wasn’t sure. I refuse to read any reviews or judge a film on anything but the trailer until I’ve seen it myself… so I went to see it for myself with a bit of trepidation. It was pretty much exactly what I thought it’d be. Well, maybe a bit less mystery and thankfully a bit less veering into horror/sci-fi. There was one line from the trailer that ended up being a bit misleading but other than that, it did not disappoint me.

spoilery spoilers »

When he says that they woke up for a reason – or it wasn’t an accident or whatever – it sets up an expectation of some sort of purpose behind it other than a faulty part. That the ship has a conscience and chose them for some reason; that something unseen and unexpected is at play. Turns out, none of that is the case.

But it was interesting in different ways than I expected and fun to watch.

The writing was stronger than I expected. A couple of times I thought it would go one way and it went in a different, more interesting direction. The characters were forced into choices instead of the plot simply playing out for them, which I enjoyed. And there were refreshing loops and layers in the plot.

more spoilers »

After accusing him of murdering her, she has to choose to essentially take his life. I would have liked a bit more weight on how she handled having to face herself making the same choice he made, though in a different way. And then, after having to take his life she works so hard to save it.

It also didn’t go down the darker (more cliche) paths hinted at in the trailer, which I appreciated

and, yup, spoilers »

like having the ship turn against them and attack them instead of just breaking down.

But the plot, by it’s nature, hinges on Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence. Especially Pratt. He’s like the perfect everyman – a little bit more handsome – a little bit tougher and a little bit funnier but fabulously unassuming in a way that makes it so easy to like him. What he lacks is a whopping dose of charisma. The films works with that, editing sharply around his time alone so it doesn’t get boring to watch just him. It’s not such a bad thing, Matt Damon has a thriving career and he’s stiff in every role and has about as much charisma as Pratt. I prefer Pratt to Damon, who I think I once called a great everyman.

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And it becomes more dynamic as soon as Lawrence is in the picture. They’re both talented enough for the film to work but neither one has the star power you’d hope for in a movie that revolves around just them.

But neither Jennifer Lawrence of Chris Pratt are especially charismatic and this film sort of exposes that. Talented, obviously. Likable, totally.

Here’s the thing, I never saw Cast Away, because it just sounded boring to me. But I remember it being such a big hit (it made over $200M domestically) and Tom Hanks was nominated for an Oscar for it. And there’s this section of Passengers where it’s only Chris Pratt. And as endearing as he is, as amusing as he is, I thought of Cast Away and that no one would show up to watch two hours of Pratt by himself the way they did for Hanks.

Still, while it’s not GREAT, it’s more than good enough. The visual effects are beautiful; there’s fun set pieces to highlight the sci-fi elements; and Pratt and Lawrence have very good chemistry and make the story grounded and practical amidst the spectacle.

Passengers is the sort of movie that, though it’s a big sci-fi spectacle, is ok if you wait to catch on tv. As enjoyable as it is, it’s a small story that isn’t compelling enough to need to see right now or epic enough to need to see in the theater.

You know those movies where the crew says they’re probably all going to die but they go in and fight against impossible odds and manage to (mostly) survive? Rogue One isn’t that story.

This is good, gritty sci-fi. It’s rough characters that would be more complex in a smaller movie but are interesting enough in this one. It’s a decent story but with all the sci-fi and the characters it doesn’t need to be much more than that.

Rogue One starts off a bit choppy. The prologue works well and sets a good foundation for both Jyn (Felicity Jones) and Galen that carries a lot of the film. But after that it cuts between three different, short scenes before getting back to Jyn. Exposition without context fills the first scene with Cassian. I would say the scene served no purpose, except that

slight spoiler »

we see Cassian kill the guy.

Which doesn’t affect the plot much but pays off in his big character moment. The second short scene with the pilot Bodhi was completely unnecessary. It would have been smoother and more emotionally connected to stay with Jyn through the breakout, then cut to the second scene with Bodhi after she talks to the Alliance. You could even transition the Cassian scene between the breakout and the talk with the Alliance to even out the pacing. There’s exposition repeated through these scenes and it would have been less confusing to see it play out more evenly and talked about less.

Eventually you become emotionally connected to more characters than just Jyn (even if you never actually know all of their names – and by you I mean me). It’s an engaging cast of that come together and bond believably, creating the core of what makes the film interesting. And though it’s a diverse group of actors, each well grounded in their characters, it’s missing the excitement of a latch.

And I’m struggling to review it without comparing it to previous Star Wars films. It’s easy to appreciate the characters when their choices are well motivated; when their emotions are grounded and authentic. All of that should be a given but it isn’t in the Star Wars universe. The first three movies verged on campy at some moments and surface emotional reactions in others (along with good moments that hooked you). The prequels were all surface and camp from talented actors with barely a resonate emotion in any of the three films.

But Rogue One succeeds because each character has authentic emotional reactions and grounded motivations. I especially like the scene with Cassian and the pilots where they talk about the things they’ve done and what they’ve become and why they have to keep fighting. It’s just dark enough to be real but not so depressing that it sours the movie. And Bodhi’s motivation is inspiring which, for me, is what makes the character likable.

The sci-fi is also more grounded, similar to the original films rather than the polished artifice of the prequels.

So, yes, just having real emotions and authentic characters in a well constructed sci-fi universe feels like a win.

It also absolves A New Hope of deus ex machina. It’s not something I really cared about, but it was still cool for the destruction of the Death Star in A New Hope to be caused by a rebel conspiracy rather than a convenient engineering oversight.

The fact that they were able to take a tragic story and turn it so that you leave the theater with hope is also a big win. It connects seamlessly with A New Hope (much more so than Revenge of the Sith did). And it works because, as much as these characters are the audience’s portal into the story, they make it about something more than these people; a larger story that continues beyond this film. It all works really well.

And also, I love sci-fi. I don’t get enough of it so just to have good sci-fi in a good story with good characters is exciting.

Writing:

★★★¼☆

Characters:

★★★½☆

Performances:

★★★¾☆

Directing:

★★★★☆

Production:

★★★★½

Overall:

★★★½☆

The best thing about Rogue one is the expansion of the Star Wars universe.

For those who read the novels, it’s been expanded for some time. But for those of us who only watched the films, this is new territory. And it’s the perfect intersection of audience desire and Hollywood mechanics. It’s an original story in a recognizable franchise.

A decade ago, franchise meant one in a succession of films. Fast 8 and Rambo 14. Films typically degraded in quality as the sequel number grew. But Marvel introduced a new era for franchises. One that Harry Potter has been toying with for a few years and will likely dive headlong into as soon as they figure out how. (I’m convinced the only reason we haven’t seen a Harry Potter tv show is that it’s cost prohibitive). One that DC would give almost anything to figure out but hasn’t quite managed yet. Rogue One nails it.

I love the idea of this larger universe; new characters and new stories that don’t have to be plugged into the central mythos around the Skywalker family and the Jedis. I like that there are still people who can harness the Force but don’t have any Jedi training so are these rogue powers. I enjoy more details about the science and the world building. All of which, and more, is in my review.

Even so, it’s not all it could be. I was struck at one moment toward the end where this character is walking; defying all the people shooting at him, walking to his death but still going. It reminded me of the scene in Lord of the Rings with Boromir when he’s taking all the arrows. But there was no purpose in this walk. He wasn’t doing it to save anyone. There was no valor in his death. And as he goes down reciting a mantra about the Force, it seemed like a very hollow power.

Purpose infuses Boromir’s death; honor and meaning and emotional resonance. Because underlying the mythology is real power. It has the presence of the divine. Of not just an awareness or a connectedness but of sentience. The Force is an empty thing and so while Star Wars is a fun universe to play in and is (now) good sci-fi, it will always lack a depth that would give the story even greater heft.

]]>http://girlsspeakgeek.com/star-wars-rogue-one/feed/0Jennifer Lawrence, Star without a Scripthttp://girlsspeakgeek.com/jennifer-lawrence-vanity-fair-november-2016/
Sat, 12 Nov 2016 01:04:15 +0000http://girlsspeakgeek.com/magnate/?p=353In a mere six years, Jennifer Lawrence has blazed past every marker of Hollywood stardom, with no sign of slowing down: next month’s science-fiction romance Passengers will be followed by movies with Steven Spielberg, Adam McKay, and Darren Aronofsky. In unreal circumstances, Lawrence is learning to assert herself as a real person, whether that means equal pay, privacy, or never being a bridesmaid again.

The bar of the Plaza Athénée, an elegant Upper East Side hotel, is empty save for an elderly French couple sipping Bordeaux at two P.M. when in bursts a tall blonde crackling with energy. It is Jennifer Lawrence, wearing a black cashmere sweater, jeans ripped at the knee, and black boots, her platinum hair chopped into a chic bob. Delicate gold jewelry circles her wrists, neck, and fingers, and her most pronounced accessory, a security team, looms nearby.

She orders tea and explains, “I am playing a ballerina in my next movie, so my first step is not drinking alcohol for every meal of the day. Obviously I’m still drinking every day,” she adds, in the same engaging, infectious manner America has come to love.

While most millennials are navigating student debt and entry-level employment, Lawrence, who turned 26 in August, hasn’t so much achieved the Hollywood dream as crushed and re-invented it by blazing an unprecedented career trajectory. In the past five years, she has won an Oscar (in 2013, for Silver Linings Playbook), earned three additional nominations (for Winter’s Bone, American Hustle, and Joy), collected three Golden Globes, gone full superhero in the $4-billion-grossing X-Men series, and fronted the nearly $3-billion-grossing Hunger Games franchise. With her next film, Passengers, Lawrence has joined Julia Roberts in an elite league of actresses who have commanded $20 million for a movie. (Lawrence will also reportedly receive 30 percent of the film’s profits after it breaks even.) While Roberts reached this paycheck peak when she was 32 (for Erin Brockovich), Lawrence has already done so, a mere six years after skyrocketing out of obscurity. (For additional perspective, Passengers marks Lawrence’s 20th film, while Meryl Streep did not appear on-screen in a feature film until she was 28.)

With her franchises behind her, Lawrence has lined up a flurry of roles to fill the next chapter of her career: the aforementioned Russian ballerina (turned spy) in Red Sparrow, directed by The Hunger Games filmmaker Francis Lawrence; war photographer Lynsey Addario in It’s What I Do, directed by Steven Spielberg; and Elizabeth Holmes, the controversial founder of the scandal-plagued Silicon Valley health-technology company Theranos, in Bad Blood. She also has a role in Mother, directed by Darren Aronofsky, which was shot last summer in Montreal. “I don’t like waking up with nothing to do or going to sleep without accomplishing anything,” Lawrence says. “That really depresses me.”

She had her big breakout role at the age of nine, when she played a prostitute from Nineveh in a church play in her native Louisville, Kentucky. Lawrence was so unexpectedly convincing—“swinging her booty and strutting her stuff,” her mother has said—that family friends told her parents, “We don’t know if we should congratulate you or not, because your kid’s a great prostitute.” Five years later, Lawrence was discovered by a modeling scout and was so eager to embark on her career that she left high school early with a G.E.D. and moved to New York.

Having reportedly banked $46 million last year—making her the highest-paid actress two years in a row—Lawrence is a long way from the horse farm where she was raised by her mother (the owner of a children’s-camp) and father (the owner of a contracting business), along with two older brothers. She is still a typical twentysomething in some ways, but with some extraordinary caveats. She is obsessed with Beyoncé’s Lemonade, for example, but met Beyoncé herself and verifies that, in person, the superstar “looks like she was sent directly from heaven.”

She watches Real Housewives but texts executive producer Andy Cohen with feedback. (She produces her phone from a black purse to recite her last mobile missive to him: “Please somehow get this to the Real Housewives of O.C.: Shannon, your mother-in-law is a dirty bastard and you are completely right. Meghan, you have got to stop apologizing—these women are better at arguing than you. Sincerely, Jennifer’s period.”) She is occasionally struck by insecurity and calls Paris Fashion Week “the most intimidating time to be alive. You get ready in your hotel and you’re like, ‘I look awesome.’ Then you walk outside, see the outfits and people who are like seven feet tall, and are like, I am a piece of garbage. I’m not going out anymore.’ ” But, having worked with Dior since 2012, she manages to get through it.

She worships the usual icons, but, more and more, they approach her, as Paul McCartney did to compliment her dancing to “Live and Let Die” in American Hustle. “I don’t think I spoke back,” she says. “I just dropped my jaw and cried.”

Lawrence is also loyal to her close friends outside the industry and makes time to celebrate their personal milestones. “All of my friends are getting married and having babies,” she says, revealing one role that she will absolutely never reprise. “Weddings rock, but I will never be a bridesmaid again,” says the four-time survivor. “There needs to be a bridesmaids’ union. It’s horrendous. If anyone asks me again, I’m going to say, ‘No. That part of my life is over. I appreciate the ask.’ If I do ever get married, I don’t think I will have bridesmaids. How can I rank my friends?”

Not that she would have the time to plan a wedding if it were on her radar. Lawrence—whose longest relationship was with X-Men co-star Nicholas Hoult—currently seems more focused on professional, rather than romantic, collaborations. As for children, Lawrence’s maternal focus right now is her small brown dog, Pippi Longstocking. “I am a psychotic dog mom in a way that I am genuinely embarrassed about.” Because of this, Lawrence jokes that having actual children “would be dangerous. My kids would be incredibly jealous because I would still be way more attentive to Pippi than I would to them.”

These days, Pippi and Lawrence are constantly on the move—recently traveling together to Montreal to film the Aronofsky movie with Michelle Pfeiffer, Ed Harris, and Javier Bardem. Lawrence had been wanting to work with the Black Swan filmmaker, so when he pitched her the project, still without a script, she immediately accepted. (“He is a visionary,” she says.)

This fall, Lawrence flew to Africa to shadow photojournalist Lynsey Addario as she documented South Sudanese refugees crossing into Uganda. Although the experience offered her a rare veil of anonymity (when introducing herself to a U.N. worker as Jennifer, he replied, “Ahhh, like Jennifer Lopez”), she was haunted by her uselessness. “The worst feeling about being there was that I wasn’t helping anybody,” she says of the humanitarian crisis. “I was doing a character study.” (Lawrence is also a producer on It’s What I Do, the Spielberg film based on Addario’s memoir.) Lawrence, who has donated generously to a number of charities (including $2 million to a children’s hospital in her hometown this year), said she found solace in vowing to visit again in a more active role.

And Pippi joined Lawrence in Atlanta, Georgia, for Passengers, a big-budget project she tried, at first, to resist. “My plan was to do a few more years of indies and remind people and myself how I started,” Lawrence says, referring to Winter’s Bone, her 2010 breakout, which earned her her first Oscar nod, at 19. Then she read the screenplay, by Jon Spaihts. “I wanted to say no, but I kept coming back to it.”

Directed by the Oscar-nominated Morten Tyldum (The Imitation Game), the reportedly $150 million movie stars Lawrence and Chris Pratt. The co-stars share several love scenes that spark—an on-screen electricity Lawrence says was easily summoned, since her co-star “could have chemistry with a cactus.” Lawrence got along with Pratt’s wife as well, appearing on her top-rated podcast, Unqualified, and forming a “spin-off friendship” with her. “I think women can sense if you are the kind of woman who is going to run off with their husband,” Lawrence explains. “I don’t think I give off that vibe. I give off the ‘Please like me!’ desperation. Which is not threatening.”

As for Pratt, she says, “He is a ray of sunshine. We had to have a talk about his good moods at four in the morning, when he was encouraging the crew and I’m like the Grinch. I came on set like, ‘No more smiling. No more dancing.’ ” Pratt laughed when I raised the subject. “Jen is really tuned in to her emotions,” he told me. “If she’s mad, she’ll let you know. She is very clear in her communication. I found it startlingly refreshing. It’s nice to work with somebody and know exactly where they stand. She’s a boss. It’s pretty awesome.”

Ingenue to Star

Lawrence was not always so assertive. Last year, after the Sony hack revealed a gender wage gap among the American Hustle cast, Lawrence took responsibility for not realizing her worth and negotiating for it. “I’m over trying to find the ‘adorable’ way to state my opinion and still be likable! F** that,” she wrote in an essay for an e-mail newsletter co-created by Lena Dunham. Although Lawrence was the first to admit that her particular problems as a workingwoman “aren’t exactly relatable,” her sentiments—about being concerned that others like her rather than fighting for herself—were, and the essay went viral.

“I feel like something really clicked when I was 25,” Lawrence reflects. “It’s not as scary to say what you mean anymore. Remember how scary that used to be? Like ‘What if they think I’m mad at them?’ Now it’s like ‘They better think I’m mad!’ ” After a quarter-century spent concerned about how others perceive her, Lawrence has turned a corner and, as evidenced by her Passengers paycheck and on-set confidence, has begun asserting herself.

Although she’s gotten career advice from some of her Oscar-winning predecessors, such as Shirley MacLaine and Jodie Foster, Lawrence has come of age as an actress in an undeniably new Hollywood frontier—one marked by declining ticket sales, expanding distribution channels, omnipresent paparazzi, and fans literally stalking their idols on the street and via social media in a relentless hunt to feed a never-ending Internet appetite. Despite these pressures, Lawrence has gracefully leapt from endearingly unvarnished ingénue to white-hot star.

Her greatest struggle has been privacy. And while she has adjusted to her hordes of fans, she does offer them a gentle caution: “You might think you know me, but when you approach me you’re a total stranger to me and I’m scared.” She sighs. “I get very protective of my space. It took me a long time to be able to do that. But if I’m eating dinner and somebody comes up and a flash goes off from someone’s iPhone camera, I am really rude to that person. Then other people at the restaurant will see and be like, ‘Oh, damn, I don’t want to do that.’ Privacy is a full-time job and I work very hard at it.”

As part of this mission, Lawrence does not comment on her dating life past Hoult. She neither confirms nor denies the reported romance she had with Coldplay front man Chris Martin in the summer of 2015. More recently, the gossip mill linked her to Aronofsky. Don’t look to Lawrence to confirm the rumor, though. In an age of unabashed oversharing, she is a throwback in that she has perfected the now ancient art of personal discretion—a tremendous feat, considering her age and station as one of the most public figures in the world. Sure, she’ll offer fans delectable personal details, but only on her terms.

She doesn’t read the rumors (“I try to just live in a nice little imaginary cocoon”), but her relatives do—and buy into each tabloid twist with the rest of America. “My brother asked me the other day, ‘Everybody online thinks you and Amy [Schumer] aren’t friends anymore,’ ” she says, annoyed. “And I said, ‘Oh, really, because everything online is always true.’ ”

But it is not just her curiosity and one-in-seven-billion charisma that renders her Hollywood’s rare double-barreled movie star—able to attract mass audiences and critical recognition. Francis Lawrence, who directed most of the Hunger Games series (and is not related to Jennifer), has his own theory about Lawrence’s superpowers. “Jen is the most in-tune person I’ve ever met,” he said. “It’s uncanny, but her gift is that she can read people so quickly and use that on-screen. I would hate to date her because you would never be able to get away with anything.”

“She has unbelievable clarity,” Stone echoed. “She can witness a situation or meet a person and see through the entire thing almost instantly. It’s stunning.”

When I bring up this compliment, Lawrence waves it off. She has a different way of describing her depth of perception. “I’m a good bullsh* detector,” she says. “Ever since I was a kid, I was always calling sh* out,” she says.

Although it seems that Lawrence has already conquered Hollywood, the Oscar winner has an offscreen ambition she’s kept closely guarded. “The directing bug hit me two years after I got the acting bug,” she admits. “But in the same intense way, only I haven’t been able to get better at it because I haven’t had time to do it yet.” To prepare, she has studied each filmmaker she’s worked with, carefully compiling notes. Granted, Hollywood has plenty of actors publicly eager to move behind the camera. What makes Lawrence somewhat unique in this scenario is that she demurs from discussing the aspiration any further.

That’s the thing about Lawrence: she may be Hollywood’s most charmingly unpretentious conversationalist. But at the end of the day, she is not satisfied to simply discuss. As her résumé shows, this 26-year-old would rather get right into the action. And with her near future fully booked, and her newfound confidence in place, we likely won’t know anything about Lawrence’s next chapter until she turns that page herself. “I would prefer to just do it,” she says, smiling and flicking the last of the popcorn into her mouth.

This article has been edited for girlsspeakgeek.com. The complete story appeared in Vanity Fair, Nov.2016.